‘Safe country’ definition holds key to common deal on refugees

This is set to prove one of the most prickly questions with which EU justice ministers will have to grapple in the coming months as they try to meet a deadline, set by the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, of devising a common asylum and immigration system.

The foundations for that system can be laid once a directive on minimum standards for accepting and rejecting asylum claims is approved by the Council of Ministers. Clinching an accord on the law proved too arduous for Italy’s EU presidency last year, so it has passed on the baton to the Irish.

The political situation in Germany has been one key impediment to achieving a breakthrough. A draft of the directive covers the situation where asylum-seekers claim they have been persecuted by ‘non-state’ elements, such as guerilla groups. Yet domestic legislation in the EU’s most populous country does not recognize the possibility that refugees need protection from forces outside the state apparatus.

And a proposed bill to remedy this has not been able to secure the requisite parliamentary majority in Berlin.

Meanwhile, pro-refugee activists are deeply troubled by the debate on introducing the concept of ‘safe countries’. In essence, this would mean that asylum-seekers who arrive at an airport or ferry terminal in one of the Union’s states could be automatically sent to another country, probably one neighbouring the Union’s borders.

Campaigners fear it cannot be guaranteed that their lives or well-being will not be placed in jeopardy by that other country.

The European Council for Refugees and Exile (ECRE), which bands together more than 78 pro-refugee lobby groups believes some of the ideas being floated about ‘safe countries’ could breach legal precedents and even the Geneva Convention, the cornerstone of international asylum law.

An enlarged EU would border such countries as Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Turkey, Belarus and Ukraine. Serious deficiencies in refugee protection standards have been identified in some of these.

In a paper prepared for the Irish presidency, ECRE voices concern about asylum-seekers being sent from the EU to Russia, which could then send them on to other countries, deemed ‘safe’ by Moscow. Effectively, the Russian authorities could use its own discretion, rather than objective criteria, to adjudicate the ‘safety’ of those countries.

For example, Russia currently refuses to process asylum bids by Afghans on the grounds they could have instead sought protection in Uzbekistan (while travelling through it en route to Russia).

The Uzbeks, however, have not signed the Geneva Convention.

A separate analysis by Amnesty International concludes that the idea of a ‘neighbouring safe third country’ “is not related to any international standard and seems to be a diversion – if not a perversion – of the original ‘safe third country’ concept”.

A 1996 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights found that an asylum-seeker could only be sent to a “country offering protection comparable to the protection they expect to find in the country where they are seeking asylum”.